Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the
twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure.
The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another,
each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are
no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school");
then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison,
the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that
serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine
of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing
convicts."

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments
of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate;
to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force
within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the
sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was
the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of
sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite
different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death
rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time,
and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society
to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to
the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated
after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer
were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of
enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an
"interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional,
etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary
reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed
forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished,
whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of
administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the
installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the
societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary
societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the
new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul
Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating
control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame
of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical
productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although
these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which
is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and
enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the
hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices,
and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate
as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements.
There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II.
Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual
passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from
zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is
analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are
inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language
of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures
are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation,
like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment
to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to
point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that
contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest
possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages;
but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory,
and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already
familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply
to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability
that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions.
If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because
they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory
constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the
boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized
a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest
rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force
that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing
each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has
not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation
replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the
school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is
the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school
to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies
of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational
system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and
the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The
Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point
between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of
judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies
(between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of
the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different
modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis,
it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary
societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual,
and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her
position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw
any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power
individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom
it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member
of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral
power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power
moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the
societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer
either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password,
while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords
(as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance).
The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to
information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the
mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and
masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money
that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline
always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard,
while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according
to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary
mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that
of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other,
from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also
in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary
man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is
undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing
has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not
that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms
capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty
made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary
societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the
passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies
of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive
danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of
viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a
mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that
can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism
of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects
a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the
means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces
conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As
for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes
by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in
the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production,
which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms
of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order
production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished
products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants
to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer
a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for
being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory
has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the
factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards
an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of
a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left
the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the
bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no
longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more
than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by
specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing
has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught
that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the
world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control
and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and
of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while
discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no
longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained
as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor
for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to
deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty
towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element
within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve
or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily
one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would
be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks
to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the
card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain
hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each
person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped
at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what
is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of
enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older
methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return
to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that
we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the
attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes,
and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay
at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous
forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training,
the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction
of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system:
the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential
sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as
they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code
of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system:
new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through
the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will
allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions,
which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system
of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude
of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against
the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to
adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against
the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the
coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young
people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships
and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being
made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty,
the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex
that the burrows of a molehill.